Pots, Flagons & Love

In Peru's verdant Chicama valley, back in the first millennium of the Christian era, lived a happy race known as the Mochicas. Their civilization was perhaps not as brilliant as that of the Incas who came later, yet they managed to live and love in ways that they thought both wise and well. They memorialized their folkways in ceramics, shaped like pots and flagons and called huacos. Last week Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, U.S. sachem of scientific sex studies, popped up among the huacos in the famed Rafael Larco Herrera Museum at Hacienda Chiclin, near Trujillo, still Pursuing his researches into the ways of love through the ages.

Some 800 of the museum's 44,000 huacos comprise the most frank and detailed record of sex customs ever left by any ancient people. They show, says the museum's Director Rafael Larco Hoyle, that among the Mochicas, "Men were men and their wives women." Only the unnatural seemed distasteful; on the huacos, the perverts shown are invariably depicted as sickly and cadaverous, while natural lovers are bronzed, handsome and healthy.

Dr. Kinsey was fascinated by the collection. Said he: "I want to study it because here we have a complete, sober and realistic record of the sex life of a people uninhibited by the things that inhibit sex life among people in the U.S. The Mochicas were not conditioned in their sex ual habits and attitudes by Judaic and Christian custom, principle and prejudice, among other things, as we are. My research among these huacos should tell me more about what is natural in sex than my research so far among American men and women."

Kinsey carefully explained that he was forming no further conclusions about the mores and manners of the Mochicas. He pointed out to interested Peruvians that his main studies center on the sex life of modern North Americans, but he hopes that what he learns of pre-Inca habits may throw some added light on his contemporary research.

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